Isis Unveiled: chapter II (A Deeper Philosophy)

“Says Henry More, the reverend English Platonist, in his answer to an attack on the believers of spiritual and magic phenomena by a skeptic of that age, named Webster: “As for that other opinion, that the greater part of the reformed divines hold, that it was the Devil that appeared in Samuel’s shape, it is beneath contempt;

for though I do not doubt but that in many of these necromantic apparitions, they are ludicrous spirits, not the souls of the deceased that appear, yet I am clear for the appearing of the soul of Samuel, and as clear that in other necromancies, it may be such kinds of spirits, as Porphyrius above describes, ‘that change themselves into omnifarious forms and shapes, and one while act the parts of daemons, another while of angels or gods, and another while of the souls of the departed.’

And I confess such a spirit as this might personate Samuel here, for anything Webster alleged to the contrary, for his arguments indeed are wonderfully weak and wooden.””